Fifty Orwell Essays

by George Orwell

entirely unmoral, and for that reason to be admired; the explanations of

  it, which were numerous and self-contradictory, could come afterwards.

  Until recently the characteristic adventure stories of the

  English-speaking peoples have been stories in which the hero fights

  AGAINST ODDS. This is true all the way from Robin Hood to Pop-eye the

  Sailor. Perhaps the basic myth of the Western world is Jack the

  Giant-killer, but to be brought up to date this should be renamed Jack

  the Dwarf-killer, and there already exists a considerable literature

  which teaches, either overtly or implicitly, that one should side with

  the big man against the little man. Most of what is now written about

  foreign policy is simply an embroidery on this theme, and for several

  decades such phrases as 'Play the game', 'Don't hit a man when he's down'

  and 'It's not cricket' have never failed to draw a snigger from anyone of

  intellectual pretensions. What is comparatively new is to find the

  accepted pattern, according to which (a) right is right and wrong is

  wrong, whoever wins, and (b) weakness must be respected, disappearing

  from popular literature as well. When I first read D. H. Lawrence's

  novels, at the age of about twenty, I was puzzled by the fact that there

  did not seem to be any classification of the characters into 'good' and

  'bad'. Lawrence seemed to sympathize with all of them about equally, and

  this was so unusual as to give me the feeling of having lost my bearings.

  Today no one would think of looking for heroes and villains in a serious

  novel, but in lowbrow fiction one still expects to find a sharp

  distinction between right and wrong and between legality and illegality.

  The common people, on the whole, are still living in the world of

  absolute good and evil from which the intellectuals have long since

  escaped. But the popularity of NO ORCHIDS and the American books and

  magazines to which it is akin shows how rapidly the doctrine of 'realism'

  is gaining ground.

  Several people, after reading NO ORCHIDS, have remarked to me, 'It's pure

  Fascism'. This is a correct description, although the book has not the

  smallest connexion with politics and very little with social or economic

  problems. It has merely the same relation to Fascism as, say Trollope's

  novels have to nineteenth-century capitalism. It is a daydream

  appropriate to a totalitarian age. In his imagined world of gangsters

  Chase is presenting, as it were, a distilled version of the modern

  political scene, in which such things as mass bombing of civilians, the

  use of hostages, torture to obtain confessions, secret prisons, execution

  without trial, floggings with rubber truncheons, drownings in cesspools,

  systematic falsification of records and statistics, treachery, bribery,

  and quislingism are normal and morally neutral, even admirable when they

  are done in a large and bold way. The average man is not directly

  interested in politics, and when he reads, he wants the current struggles

  of the world to be translated into a simple story about individuals. He

  can take an interest in Slim and Fenner as he could not in the G.P.U. and

  the Gestapo. People worship power in the form in which they are able to

  understand it. A twelve-year-old boy worships Jack Dempsey. An adolescent

  in a Glasgow slum worships Al Capone. An aspiring pupil at a business

  college worships Lord Nuffield. A NEW STATESMAN reader worships Stalin.

  There is a difference in intellectual maturity, but none in moral

  outlook. Thirty years ago the heroes of popular fiction had nothing in

  common with Mr. Chase's gangsters and detectives, and the idols of the

  English liberal intelligentsia were also comparatively sympathetic

  figures. Between Holmes and Fenner on the one hand, and between Abraham

  Lincoln and Stalin on the other, there is a similar gulf.

  One ought not to infer too much from the success of Mr. Chase's books. It

  is possible that it is an isolated phenomenon, brought about by the

  mingled boredom and brutality of war. But if such books should definitely

  acclimatize themselves in England, instead of being merely a

  half-understood import from America, there would be good grounds for

  dismay. In choosing RAFFLES as a background for NO ORCHIDS I deliberately

  chose a book which by the standards of its time was morally equivocal.

  Raffles, as I have pointed out, has no real moral code, no religion,

  certainly no social consciousness. All he has is a set of reflexes the

  nervous system, as it were, of a gentleman. Give him a sharp tap on this

  reflex or that (they are called 'sport', 'pal', 'woman', 'king and

  country' and so forth), and you get a predictable reaction. In Mr.

  Chase's books there are no gentlemen and no taboos. Emancipation is

  complete. Freud and Machiavelli have reached the outer suburbs. Comparing

  the schoolboy atmosphere of the one book with the cruelty and corruption

  of the other, one is driven to feel that snobbishness, like hypocrisy, is

  a check upon behaviour whose value from a social point of view has been

  underrated.

  ANTISEMITISM IN BRITAIN (1945)

  There are about 400,000 known Jews in Britain, and in addition some

  thousands or, at most, scores of thousands of Jewish refugees who have

  entered the country from 1934 onwards. The Jewish population is almost

  entirely concentrated in half a dozen big towns and is mostly employed

  in the food, clothing and furniture trades. A few of the big monopolies,

  such as the ICI, one or two leading newspapers and at least one big

  chain of department stores are Jewish-owned or partly Jewish-owned, but

  it would be very far from the truth to say that British business life is

  dominated by Jews. The Jews seem, on the contrary, to have failed to

  keep up with the modern tendency towards big amalgamations and to have

  remained fixed in those trades which are necessarily carried out on a

  small scale and by old-fashioned methods.

  I start off with these background facts, which are already known to any

  well-informed person, in order to emphasise that there is no real Jewish

  "problem" in England. The Jews are not numerous or powerful enough, and

  it is only in what are loosely called "intellectual circles" that they

  have any noticeable influence. Yet it is generally admitted that

  antisemitism is on the increase, that it has been greatly exacerbated by

  the war, and that humane and enlightened people are not immune to it. It

  does not take violent forms (English people are almost invariably gentle

  and law-abiding), but it is ill-natured enough, and in favourable

  circumstances it could have political results. Here are some samples of

  antisemitic remarks that have been made to me during the past year or

  two:

  Middle-aged office employee: "I generally come to work by bus. It takes

  longer, but I don't care about using the Underground from Golders Green

  nowadays. There's too many of the Chosen Race travelling on that line."

  Tobacconist (woman): "No, I've got no matches for you. I should try the

  lady down the street. SHE'S always got matches. One of the Chosen Race,

  you see."

 
Young intellectual, Communist or near-Communist: "No, I do NOT like

  Jews. I've never made any secret of that. I can't stick them. Mind you,

  I'm not antisemitic, of course."

  Middle-class woman: "Well, no one could call me antisemitic, but I do

  think the way these Jews behave is too absolutely stinking. The way they

  push their way to the head of queues, and so on. They're so abominably

  selfish. I think they're responsible for a lot of what happens to them."

  Milk roundsman: "A Jew don't do no work, not the same as what an

  Englishman does. 'E's too clever. We work with this 'ere" (flexes his

  biceps). "They work with that there" (taps his forehead).

  Chartered accountant, intelligent, left-wing in an undirected way:

  "These bloody Yids are all pro-German. They'd change sides tomorrow if

  the Nazis got here. I see a lot of them in my business. They admire

  Hitler at the bottom of their hearts. They'll always suck up to anyone

  who kicks them."

  Intelligent woman, on being offered a book dealing with antisemitism and

  German atrocities: "Don't show it me, PLEASE don't show it to me. It'll

  only make me hate the Jews more than ever."

  I could fill pages with similar remarks, but these will do to go on

  with. Two facts emerge from them. One--which is very important and which

  I must return to in a moment--is that above a certain intellectual level

  people are ashamed of being antisemitic and are careful to draw a

  distinction between "antisemitism" and "disliking Jews". The other is

  that antisemitism is an irrational thing. The Jews are accused of

  specific offences (for instance, bad behaviour in food queues) which the

  person speaking feels strongly about, but it is obvious that these

  accusations merely rationalise some deep-rooted prejudice. To attempt to

  counter them with facts and statistics is useless, and may sometimes be

  worse than useless. As the last of the above-quoted remarks shows,

  people can remain antisemitic, or at least anti-Jewish, while being

  fully aware that their outlook is indefensible. If you dislike somebody,

  you dislike him and there is an end of it: your feelings are not made

  any better by a recital of his virtues.

  It so happens that the war has encouraged the growth of antisemitism and

  even, in the eyes of many ordinary people, given some justification for

  it. To begin with, the Jews are one people of whom it can be said with

  complete certainty that they will benefit by an Allied victory.

  Consequently the theory that "this is a Jewish war" has a certain

  plausibility, all the more so because the Jewish war effort seldom gets

  its fair share of recognition. The British Empire is a huge

  heterogeneous organisation held together largely by mutual consent, and

  it is often necessary to flatter the less reliable elements at the

  expense of the more loyal ones. To publicise the exploits of Jewish

  soldiers, or even to admit the existence of a considerable Jewish army

  in the Middle East, rouses hostility in South Africa, the Arab countries

  and elsewhere: it is easier to ignore the whole subject and allow

  the man in the street to go on thinking that Jews are exceptionally

  clever at dodging military service. Then again, Jews are to be found in

  exactly those trades which are bound to incur unpopularity with the

  civilian public in war-time. Jews are mostly concerned with selling

  food, clothes, furniture and tobacco--exactly the commodities of which

  there is a chronic shortage, with consequent overcharging,

  black-marketing and favouritism. And again, the common charge that Jews

  behave in an exceptionally cowardly way during air raids was given a

  certain amount of colour by the big raids of 1940. As it happened, the

  Jewish quarter of Whitechapel was one of the first areas to be heavily

  blitzed, with the natural result that swarms of Jewish refugees

  distributed themselves all over London. If one judged merely from these

  war-time phenomena, it would be easy to imagine that antisemitism is a

  quasi-rational thing, founded on mistaken premises. And naturally the

  antisemite thinks of himself as a reasonable being. Whenever I have

  touched on this subject in a newspaper article, I have always had a

  considerable "come-back", and invariably some of the letters are from

  well-balanced, middling people--doctors, for example--with no apparent

  economic grievance. These people always say (as Hitler says in MEIN KAMPF)

  that they started out with no anti-Jewish prejudice but were driven into

  their present position by mere observation of the facts. Yet one of the

  marks of antisemitism is an ability to believe stories that could not

  possibly be true. One could see a good example of this in the strange

  accident that occurred in London in 1942, when a crowd, frightened by a

  bomb-burst nearby, fled into the mouth of an Underground station, with the

  result that something over a hundred people were crushed to death. The

  very same day it was repeated all over London that "the Jews were

  responsible". Clearly, if people will believe this kind of thing, one will

  not get much further by arguing with them. The only useful approach is to

  discover WHY they can swallow absurdities on one particular subject while

  remaining sane on others.

  But now let me come back to that point I mentioned earlier--that there

  is widespread awareness of the prevalence of antisemitic feeling, and

  unwillingness to admit sharing it. Among educated people, antisemitism

  is held to be an unforgivable sin and in a quite different category from

  other kinds of racial prejudice. People will go to remarkable lengths to

  demonstrate that they are NOT antisemitic. Thus, in 1943 an intercession

  service on behalf of the Polish Jews was held in a synagogue in St

  John's Wood. The local authorities declared themselves anxious to

  participate in it, and the service was attended by the mayor of the

  borough in his robes and chain, by representatives of all the churches,

  and by detachments of RAF, Home Guards, nurses, Boy Scouts and what not.

  On the surface it was a touching demonstration of solidarity with the

  suffering Jews. But it was essentially a CONSCIOUS effort to behave

  decently by people whose subjective feelings must in many cases have

  been very different. That quarter of London is partly Jewish,

  antisemitism is rife there, and, as I well knew, some of the men sitting

  round me in the synagogue were tinged by it. Indeed, the commander of my

  own platoon of Home Guards, who had been especially keen beforehand that

  we should "make a good show" at the intercession service, was an

  ex-member of Mosley's Blackshirts. While this division of feeling

  exists, tolerance of mass violence against Jews, or, what is more

  important, antisemitic legislation, are not possible in England. It is

  not at present possible, indeed, that antisemitism should BECOME

  RESPECTABLE. But this is less of an advantage than it might appear.

  One effect of the persecutions in Germany has been to prevent

  antisemitism from being seriously studied. In England a brief inadequate

  survey was made by Mass Observation a year or two ago,
but if there has

  been any other investigation of the subject, then its findings have been

  kept strictly secret. At the same time there has been conscious

  suppression, by all thoughtful people, of anything likely to wound

  Jewish susceptibilities. After 1934 the Jew joke disappeared as though

  by magic from postcards, periodicals and the music-hall stage, and to

  put an unsympathetic Jewish character into a novel or short story came

  to be regarded as antisemitism. On the Palestine issue, too, it was DE

  RIGUEUR among enlightened people to accept the Jewish case as proved and

  avoid examining the claims of the Arabs--a decision which might be

  correct on its own merits, but which was adopted primarily because the

  Jews were in trouble and it was felt that one must not criticise them.

  Thanks to Hitler, therefore, you had a situation in which the press was

  in effect censored in favour of the Jews while in private antisemitism

  was on the up-grade, even, to some extent, among sensitive and

  intelligent people. This was particularly noticeable in 1940 at the time

  of the internment of the refugees. Naturally, every thinking person felt

  that it was his duty to protest against the wholesale locking-up of

  unfortunate foreigners who for the most part were only in England

  because they were opponents of Hitler. Privately, however, one heard

  very different sentiments expressed. A minority of the refugees behaved

  in an exceedingly tactless way, and the feeling against them necessarily

  had an antisemitic undercurrent, since they were largely Jews. A very

  eminent figure in the Labour Party--I won't name him, but he is one of

  the most respected people in England--said to me quite violently: "We

  never asked these people to come to this country. If they choose to come

  here, let them take the consequences." Yet this man would as a matter of

  course have associated himself with any kind of petition or manifesto

  against the internment of aliens. This feeling that antisemitism is

  something sinful and disgraceful, something that a civilised person does

  not suffer from, is unfavourable to a scientific approach, and indeed

  many people will admit that they are frightened of probing too deeply

  into the subject. They are frightened, that is to say, of discovering

  not only that antisemitism is spreading, but that they themselves are

  infected by it.

  To see this in perspective one must look back a few decades, to the days

  when Hitler was an out-of-work house-painter whom nobody had heard of.

  One would then find that though antisemitism is sufficiently in evidence

  now, it is probably LESS prevalent in England than it was thirty years

  ago. It is true that antisemitism as a fully thought-out racial or

  religious doctrine has never flourished in England. There has never been

  much feeling against inter-marriage, or against Jews taking a prominent

  part in public life. Nevertheless, thirty years ago it was accepted more

  or less as a law of nature that a Jew was a figure of fun and--though

  superior in intelligence--slightly deficient in "character". In theory a

  Jew suffered from no legal disabilities, but in effect he was debarred

  from certain professions. He would probably not have been accepted as an

  officer in the navy, for instance, nor in what is called a "smart"

  regiment in the army. A Jewish boy at a public school almost invariably

  had a bad time. He could, of course, live down his Jewishness if he was

  exceptionally charming or athletic, but it was an initial disability

  comparable to a stammer or a birthmark. Wealthy Jews tended to disguise

  themselves under aristocratic English or Scottish names, and to the

  average person it seemed quite natural that they should do this, just as

  it seems natural for a criminal to change his identity if possible.

  About twenty years ago, in Rangoon, I was getting into a taxi with a

  friend when a small ragged boy of fair complexion rushed up to us and